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Tuesday, November 29, 2005

For probably years I've had a huge problem with almost every magical system I've bumped into. It's a gender problem. In almost every magical book I've read, with the exception on one of Cunningham's books on herbs (he replaces "Male and Female" with "Hot and Cold"). The trait of being female is always associated with the moon, and list of traits reads like this:(This is from Wicca: A Year and a Day by Timothy Roderick)

MoonContractingDarkYinPassive...

Being male is associated with the sun:SunExpandingLightYangActive...

This has always upset and then puzzled me in equal measure. The upset comes from having a Christian upbringing and being brow-beaten with the idea that women are basically passive. Finding what appears to be the same idea in every religion I have seen was upsetting.

Why upsetting? Because it's puzzling to me. The puzzlement is that one of the reasons I left Christianity (other than it not making sense to me), was that associating a physical sex with personality traits never made sense to me at all--it just wasn't realistic when I looked at myself and my friends.

Whenever I would voice this question in Christianity, I would get the "read your bible" answer.

When I started asking about the divine polarity in Wicca I'd get something like this:"Yes, but the Lord and the Lady are part of the same energy. We each have pieces of the God and Goddess within us"I feel this skips neatly around the question--why is the sun associated with being male in the first place? Why is the moon female?

But as I was reading this rather fluffy exercise in a Wicca: A Year and a Day book it struck me that if I just remove the Male and Female genders from the list of traits for the moon and sun--it starts making a lot more sense!The sun *is* fiery, full of light, associated with being active. The moon is in my mind as being dark, dreaming, and cool. Gender has nothing to do with it!